My sleek mac is more like a Jaguar then a chevy.  Yes it is in the shop.

My machine and 4 of its cousins left our office last week for an undisclosed service center for an indeterminate amount of time.

I’m using a Dell laptop.  The dell hardware is really solid as is the wireless connectivity.  The operating system is windows on top of full drive encryption so the software experience leaves something to be desired.  When I unplug the wire it immediately hops onto the corporate wireless network, something the mac can’t do (yet).

My next exploration will be to figure out how to script osx such that when the ethernet is unplugged it looks for the hidden SSID of the corp wireless.

In the meantime I did get a laugh out of an NCIS rerun where Ziva plays whack-a-mole with error dialogs on her Windows PC and says,” At Massad we used Mac”

Due to an unfortunate series of work related events I find myself writing php code.  Not only php code, but wordpress php code.  That however is the topic of a later post (as is plugins that edit core code using regex based searches)

I did the work in textmate but decided to spin up my new Netbeans 6.5 in order to test the subversion functionality.

Immediately I noticed that Netbeans picked up a tag mismatch and highlighted it nicely:

Netbeans showing off a tag mismatch

This was enough to impress me and I did a quick google to find netbeans other HTML / Front-end features.

It now has a nice CSS editor that is comparable to some of the tools I fondly remember from 5 years ago.  The preview and menu driven selectors are easy to work with.  I’d rather have a better code completion like Firebug, but this effort is great to see from a Java dev tool.

Netbeans CSS editor

My girlfriend’s mom bought her one of those inexpensive ‘wireless’ notebook mouses.  It is not even bluetooth enabled, it requires a USB adapter.

I used it over the weekend and found it much better then my hip Apple mouse. Although I can’t squeeze it ( www.apple.com/mightymouse/ ) it is much easier to use.

The tilt wheel concept is more precise then the little ball on the apple and the optical sensor works across any surface. This mouse works on my office desk where the apple mouse fails (and a dog did eat my mousepad)

Anyway consider this a product endorsement, and go get a Logitech v200. I’m off to find a bluetooth version….

Sun released version 1 of javaFX today – http://www.javafx.com/

Its a competitor to Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, but based on the java developer created demos it just does not look complelling enough to matter.

Adobe had been making some great progress in the Flash virtual machine and the number of advances in Flash10 really impress the coder in me.  As a development manager I’m seeing Actionscript programmers reach an impressive level of maturity, with unit testing, automated builds and solid object design.

I’m interested enough in this to want to dig in more but no project in my queue comes to mind.  I’m only using Flash now for video players.

So for now I’m downloading this technology and looking for a problem…….